Features

Editor’s note: Author Cole Waddell is a Lancaster resident who was living in New York City during the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. He moved back here in 2005. This is the first part of a three-part series about Southerners who shared Christmas dinner there each year.

Family. We all belong to (at least) one. Our families can include the people we cherish and love the most.

According to broad definition, “family” means a group of people who are tied together through some common thread – whether it be biological, ancestry, living arrangements, common interest or love. Family, in my dictionary, has 11 distinct definitions.

Thanks to cyberspace, cell phones, Twitter, and e-mail, reaching someone halfway around the world is almost instantaneous with very little face to face interaction.

There’s nothing wrong with using technology to your advantage, but that’s not always the way the Rev. T. Edward Kofi, director of African Christians Fellowship International (ACFI) does things. Yes, Kofi has a Facebook page, but he prefers to reach out in love.

There is a quotation by Albert Einstein tacked up in my work cubicle. He was a genius when it comes to capillary forces, general relativity, matter-energy equivalence and how light from another star can be bent by the sun’s gravity.

It isn’t Einstein’s ability to comprehend atomic vibrations, wave-point duality and critical opalescence that I respect. Gosh, I have trouble just spelling Brownian motion and thermodynamic fluctuations, much less discerning what all of that means.

Editor’s note – The Lancaster News recently asked readers on its Facebook page to share memories on family members who proudly served in the United States military. Here is Mickey R. Hinson Sr.‘s story on his dad, the late John Harry Hinson, who died Feb. 16, 2008, at the age of 92.

This was my father in the U.S. Army infantry in Germany and Italy in World War II.